By Charles Waterstreet

7 May 2016 — 2:43pm

The Moreton Bay fig tree is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the arboreal world. It's thick as Arnold's thighs, branches explode from the squat trunk as if covered in the skin of a hundred elephants, looking like they are snap frozen from a prehistoric age.

We lost the half dozen mighty Moreton Bay figs last week in an inhuman sacrifice, limb by limb, twig by twig, by hacking them to death with chainsaws on cherry pickers. All in the name of Light Rail. The Killing Fields of Kensington were draped with sky blue plastic curtains to prevent the public from seeing the felling of the gigantic, defenceless trees.

The first of the six Anzac Parade Moreton Bay fig trees scheduled for destruction comes down on Tuesday to make room for the light rail in Sydney. Credit:Janie Barrett

The Big Baird Government printed their lying slogans across the curtains; "This area has been secured for tree protection works". We felt, for a brief moment, empathy with Indigenous Australians, who see their sacred sites penetrated by drilling bits on a daily basis, as the beating heart of Australia is pulled and plundered from the ground, and shipped in bulk tankers to the highest bidder.

Sydney has only a few gorgeous trees, fisting through the concrete and asphalt that covers the ground for hundreds of miles around. We lost a few in Darlinghurst in the name of the Cross City Tunnel, a few in Hyde Park, and now Centennial Park is gutted "in the construction of the CBD and South East Light Rail". It's as if a mad king resolved to rid the kingdom of evidence of earlier forms of civilisation, as if all the fossils were to be removed from a country's fields lest it disprove the Bible.

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The Big Baird Government thinks nature is sufficiently supplied by parks like "Wet'n'Wild". When Patrick White in March 1972 read the Herald which suggested that Moore Park and the lower reaches of Centennial Park were to be covered in concrete for a State Sport Centre and prospective Olympic bid, he and the Builders Labourers Federation's Jack Mundey​ formed a holy alliance that did not allow Heaven and Earth to move for sport. White threatened to leave Australia. "If the worst happened and we are bulldozed out, we shall bundle in just about anywhere provided there is a good backyard, and wait til the last of our aged dogs have died, then leave this country forever."

This city sorely needs men and women like White and Mundey, to chain themselves to the few remaining trees, as Bob Brown did for the Franklin, to overcome the irresistible purge on nature by this Big Baird Government.

Protesters showed up as if for a funeral or wake, rather than preventing one. We need to fight for the remnants of our humanity, lest they become ruins and railings in the transportation industry. Governments have squandered one of the few favours that earlier generations have planted in perpetuity for the avoidance of a "zigzag railway" along Alison Road and Anzac Parade. By early morning the proud trees laid like carved-up totems, ready to be taken by truck for burial. The majestic has been slaughtered for the sake of the tragic.

It is not a victim of climate change, but merely for loose change, for the sake of a cheap fare to Coogee. As White himself wrote, "a most horrifying way of vulgarity is sweeping the land".

As we mourn the Moreton Bay fig trees we must resolve to preserve the little we have left. We know deep in our bones there is truth in the simple signs of nature.

Joyce Kilmer wrote, "I think I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree", and that railroads can be made by men as "poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree".

Great cities are judged by what the builders preserved, not by what they plundered. Our leaders are letting us down, hardly a hand raised in defiance of the Big Baird Government. Our trees and nature preserves need activist spokespeople as they can only exist eloquently, they cannot lay spread-eagled on the road threatening not to move unless the remaining trees are allowed to blossom and flower.

Clover Moore moves mountains for bikers, but it's Cloverless when the trees' backs are against the wall, speechless against the firing squad of tree SWAT-ers dressed in fluoro, chafing at the bit, covered in sawdust, the blood and bones of the late defiled and desecrated evergreen banyan trees of Waverley.